Jaywood - Leo Negro [Light Blue]

Leo Negro is JayWood's most restless record yet, eleven tracks of controlled chaos pressed to light blue vinyl from a Winnipeg experimentalist who decamped to Montreal and found a stranger, braver version of himself waiting there.

Jeremy Haywood-Smith has never been interested in staying put, musically or otherwise, and this 2025 album pushes deliberately away from the slick pop of Slingshot and the Grow On EP. The title is a translation game he plays on himself: Leos are supposed to be all confidence, and this record is anything but, so black confidence becomes his term for something weirder and more honest, a way to write about identity crisis without pretending to have solved it. His childhood habit of reversing and slowing songs in a computer media player is still the operating principle, just aimed at building whole worlds instead of warping other people's.

Pistachios opens the case for the defense over vintage hip-hop scrubs, admitting the need for attention outright. Big Tings brings in Tune-Yards for a twinkling synth intro that owes as much to Toro y Moi as D'Angelo, Assumptions channels Tyler, The Creator's energy through a ballad's frame, and Sun Baby closes on a warm 60s glow of mellotron and BBC symphony samples.

A Polaris nominee could have rinsed and repeated. He's a Leo, so he didn't.